The invention relates to a support for a plate, slab or tray intended to be secured to an upright element, column, pillar or post, such as a metallic leg of a table having at least two trays, of the type of a trolley, an occasional table, a television stand or the like.
Numerous models of tables with metallic legs, generally tubular, exist and they include a top and one or several trays or shelves distributed over the height of the legs. Mostly the legs form part of a tubular metallic frame, stable by itself, comprising longitudinal and lateral cross-members on which are fixed slabs generally of wood or of "laminated" or of "composite" materials.
In order to reduce its cost price and the bulk of the table when disassembled, it is known to eliminate the cross-members and to fix the trays directly on supports borne rigidly and laterally by the legs. The horizontal stability of the assembled table then depends upon the rigidity of the trays, the top tray replacing, for this purpose, the upper longitudinal and lateral cross-members and the lower tray replacing the cross-members between the legs.
However this horizontal stability is often insufficient when the table is heavily loaded, for example by a television set, on account of the elastic flexibility of the supports fixed to the legs. This elastic deformation of a support occurs at its surface which is in contact with the underneath of the tray. To prevent this deformation, the bearing surface of the support and the lower surface of the tray must be made perfectly fast to one another, that is to say, in the most general case where the fixing of the trays to the support is effected by screwing, at least three non-aligned screw positions must exit. Even if such an arrangement is sufficient when the trays are made of hard wood, this is not the case when the trays are of soft wood or cut out from a panel of less homogeneous material, such as compacted chipwood. In the latter case, the differences in distance between the points of application of the load and the positions of the fixing screws, make the bearing surface of each support tend to flex along a line joining the screws closest to the point of application, whilst the one or more other screws are partially pulled out and assume a "play" rendering them useless.